


Servant Song

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:42:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21896101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Rey pauses to grieve a man named Ben Solo, there at the end of everything, but she has spent nearly twenty years teaching herself to hope in the face of all contrary evidence and perhaps it will remain a gift that serves her well.
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 21
Kudos: 165





	Servant Song

…

Years later, Rey will not remember what it feels like to die.

She will not remember being dead, either, although it will on occasion prove advantageous to let her enemies and her opponents at holochess alike believe she does, and to therefore regard her with a prudently superstitious precaution. She will remember no locked doors, no opened gates, no translucent nights bristling with blue-white stars among which she is asked to take her place, no ascension to a balcony of sunlight set high above the vagaries which necessarily come with carrying that terrible, limitless thing most people call a soul inside that breakable, undependable thing most people call a body.

She will remember only a pair of arms, first the grasping ones of a woman in a blue veil whose name she cannot remember and next the sheltering ones of a man dressed all in black whose name she does, and of course – with the sort of long, clear memory only a place as far-seeing and desolate as Jakku can cultivate – she will remember watching Ben Solo fall.

Rey clutches at him.

This is not sufficient to keep him upright, which she no longer has the strength for anyway, but it is enough to stop him from striking the cold stone. His head lolls to one side like a tired child’s.

“Ben.” Something draws tight around her throat. Her vision swims and doubles. “Ben, don’t.”

There may be a moment when the colors of him begin to fade, at the edges, the way mist burns off a field at daybreak, until Rey hauls him across her knees and sinks her face against his bare neck where the skin is still warm. Her mouth is still warm, as well, and her lips still hold the salted tastes of rainwater and blood that may be hers or his.

“Don’t go like this, Ben,” she hears herself say. “Please.”

There is no answer except her own echoing voice through the cavern, and she sits there at the foot of a broken throne while the dazzling pageantry of war blazes above her. Rey opens her right fist – there is a callus at the side of its tallest finger, where a scribe in the Old Republic might have borne a permanent splotch of ink, and this is the place where the alusteel file rested against her knuckle as she scratched each new tally into the wall – and she reaches down to take Ben’s hand.

The life he has just given her seems to pound inside her veins and pass like a lamp through the darkened chambers of her heart. She closes her eyes; behind them she glimpses a woman seated at a looking glass while a young boy stands tugging a veda pearl comb through her curtaining brown hair; a man, too young yet too old, wraps his fingers around the sabre-hilt he and the young boy are both holding, and silently he adjusts two fingers on the boy’s grip; a voice, dry and weightless as snake skin, binds itself into knots around the tangles of the boy’s mind; a ship with two prongs like a pair of swift wings twists over into dive, past the impossible horizon of light-speed, and the man in the pilot seat gives a whooping laugh; a girl dressed all in white stands amidst the falling snow and raises a sword to meet his.

Rey opens her eyes and starts to cry.

Keep it, she might whisper, both now and in whatever myths they will tell about this afterwards. Keep it. Take it back. It’s yours, it’s yours, it’s yours and should have been yours all along. A single damp lock of his hair slips across his forehead to touch shyly, tenderly at her face, and she cradles him so close it makes her arms ache.

She is still holding him this way when the stranger comes to her.

The steps are soundless. There is no greeting or annunciation, so that Rey does not note the change until a sensation dances down her spine and she looks up into the eyes of a woman she does not know, though for a flickering instant she believes it to be Leia: but the stranger kneels, and Rey sees she is wearing a shirt so rough and unadorned that it must mark her as either a slave or a holy martyr. The air trembles around her like the invisible vibrations around a candle. She wears her dark hair coiled up at one side of her neck and her face is crossed everywhere with soft lines.

Her eyes are dark, too, and Rey knows them. 

The woman smiles. She reaches out. Her hand is held loosely up and its palm is turned forward as if to bestow a blessing. She opens her mouth.

And Rey cannot hear what the woman says, if in fact she says anything, but if she does then it may be something that begins with the words _‘I love.’_

A rush of light passes through them both. Rey blinks – unspent tears have welled up stinging in her eyes – and the woman is gone. The air burns with an afterimage of her. 

Then the stilled fingers beneath hers shift, slightly, and when Rey looks down again Ben’s eyes are drowsily opened.

“Uh.” He grimaces. “I think my ribs are broken.”

Rey keeps him held fast in her arms so that they both fall flat against the stone together. All at once she takes in the penetrating eyes and the sweeping nose and the full, solemn mouth that is spreading into another smile filled with crooked teeth, the freckling on his face and tangled hair around his ears and the tireless heart she can feel knocking against her breastbone. Ben stifles a grunt of pain when they tilt backwards but winds both his arms around her; Rey murmurs her apologies between the next three kisses with which she crowns him.

“Well.” Ben winces and smiles again. “I admit that’s a better reception than I was expecting.” 

“It’s a start, anyway.” Years later, Rey will not forget the sound of his name as she speaks it into his ear. “Ben, Ben, Ben.”

…

**Author's Note:**

> All I really have to say at this point about The Rise of Skywalker is that I don’t think Shmi Skywalker, matriarch of the Skywalker line and chosen by the Force itself, will be very happy to hear about this.


End file.
